Story of the Week

YouTube, ASCAP to Share Data in First-Ever Voluntary Deal
In what is the performance rights group’s first-ever fully-negotiated, voluntary licensing deal with the decade-old video hub not prompted by a rate-court proceeding, ASCAP will combine its database of 10.5 million musical works with YouTube’s data exchange, a move that ASCAP’s CEO Elizabeth Matthews says will result in bigger payouts.

Other Music News Highlights

Canada’s SOCAN Collected Record-Setting $249M In Royalties For 2016. The PRO said it recorded “new highs on almost every front,” with nearly 4,500 businesses that use music became “licensed to play” with SOCAN and 6,500 additional songwriters, composers and music publishers signed up for membership.

Merlin Deals Paying Out The Equivalent Of Nearly $1M A Day To Independent Labels. Before the end of March, Merlin’s admin fee for these members was 2% of total revenues – it proudly reduced this to 1.5% in April – suggesting its total collections in the 2016/2017 period stood at around $360M.

Believe Digital Actively Seeks Sale, Major Players Show Interest. Global independent distributor, label services provider, and TuneCore owner Believe Digital is for sale, sources tell Hypebot, and a two to three week deadline has been set for initial bids.

Sony/ATV’s Martin Bandier Calls on Spotify, Apple Music, And YouTube To Credit Songwriters. While he acknowledged that songwriters and publishers are beginning to benefit from the uptick in revenues with the rise of streaming, he was quick to note that “songwriters and music publishers, while we’re headed in the right direction, the fruits of our labor are not being equitably rewarded and we are not benefiting from the streaming revolution as meaningfully as we should.”

Top Music News Story

SOCAN Set To Join Forces With Reproduction Rights Body SODRAC
Canadian music rights bodies SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors & Music Publishers of Canada) and SODRAC (Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers in Canada) are actively discussing the possibility of combining operations.

‘The integration of the management of public performance rights and reproduction rights could have many advantages and would reduce operating costs for rights holder members of each organization, and promises to increase efficiencies, leverage licensing relationships, and reduce operating costs, resulting in even more money to go to those who have earned royalties for their music and streamlined licensing for businesses using music,’ read a press release.

Other Music News Highlights

Canadian Music Rights Groups Hope to Make ‘Quick Progress’ on Merger. Baptiste expects to have board approval “within the next few months,” but notes that timeline could change: “We are meeting again. It’s going to be up to the board of SOCAN and the board of SODRAC to decide, but we hope to make quick progress on this.”

Spotify Signs Long-Term Deal With Universal, Opens Door on Windowing. The agreement, announced last week, represents the end of Spotify’s long-standing policy of granting all of its users — both free and premium alike — access to complete albums on their release dates.

Universal And Spotify’s Deal Is An Even Bigger Deal Than It Looks. Mark Mulligan writes that “Although the big focus across the industry so far is, understandably, on what this means for Spotify, it is also part of a bigger story, namely that of the maturation of the streaming market and its associated business models.”

Could Spotify ‘IPO’ (Without An IPO) As Early As September? Much has been made of Spotify’s imminent IPO, but a new report suggests the streaming service is instead considering a different approach – through a direct listing on a US stock exchange.

Google Play Music Launches in India, Undercuts Apple. Google is offering users its streaming service and radio stations for an initial discounted price of Rs 89 per month ($1.40) for those that sign up within 45 days, reports the India Times.

Major Scandal At The Copyright Office With $25 Million ‘Fake Budget’ Line Item. According to a Techdirt report, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante put in place a fake twenty-five million dollar budget line item, and then intentionally deceived congress about it.

YouTube, Creators Respond To Monetization Threshold Change. Many throughout the industry have had strong reaction to YouTube’s changes to their monetization rules, including YouTube itself.

Top Story Last Week

SOCAN, CD Baby, SongTrust And FUGA Back DotBlockchain
The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC), which aims to solve data, rights, ownership and payment issues in the music industry, has won backing from SOCAN and subsidiary MediaNet, plus Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA. The partners will contribute technical and financial resources to the project, which will allow dotBC to accelerate its product development efforts.

Other Music News Highlights

ESPN Reaches Settlement in Music Licensing Dispute. The deal resolves a rate-setting proceeding that ESPN initiated a year ago when it sued BMI for allegedly not being reasonable in licensing negotiations.

Netflix Taps BMG for Music Publishing Rights Outside U.S. The exclusive agreement covers elements such as scores, featured songs, transition cues and themes for all Netflix-owned original programming, including TV series, docs and feature films.

Canada’s SOCAN Announces 8 Percent Growth in Revenue, Huge Jump in Streaming. “SOCAN’s work to lead the global transformation of music rights continues, benefitting music creators and publishers even more in terms of royalties identified, collected, and distributed in Canada and worldwide,” said CEO Eric Baptiste, in a statement.

SoundExchange Pays Out Record $884 Million. The record comes amid uncertainty over how SoundExchange revenue will be affected by an increasing number of direct deals between digital broadcaster and rightsholders.

Report Claims Spotify IPO Could Slip Back To 2018. TechCrunch heard from multiple sources that the company is weighing a plan to delay an IPO until 2018 to build up a better balance sheet and work on shifting its business model to improve its margins.

Story of the Week

Music Piracy Costs Europe $190 Million a Year, EU Study Estimates
Music piracy has taken a small but noticeable bite out of potential profits for the recording industry throughout Europe, according to a new study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The report places an estimate on lost music sales in 19 EU states as a result of piracy in 2014, and comes up with a total of €170 million ($190 million), or 5.2 percent of all sales.

When broken down, that amounts to €113 million ($126 million) in lost digital sales and €57m ($63.5 million) in lost physical sales, the report finds. That’s the equivalent of 5.2 percent of the sector’s revenues from both physical and digital sales.

Two member states, Germany and the U.K., account for more than half of those losses. Europe’s biggest market, Germany lost €40 million ($44.5 million) in sales due to piracy, while the U.K. lost €49 million ($54.6 million). In France, where physical sales make up two-thirds of music sales, about €26.4 ($29 million) remained on the floor. And in the land of Spotify — Sweden — €8.9 million of the €9.1 million ($10 million) total lost was in digital formats.

David Lowery and Melissa Ferrick’s Lawsuits Against Spotify Get Combined. The suits were essentially the same in purpose and aim, and now Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell of the Central District of California has granted a motion for them to be consolidated.

iHeartMedia Wins Court Case Over Stock Shuffle Designed to Deal with Its Massive Debt. As the San Antonio Express-News reports, Judge Cathleen Stryker ruled in favor of the media company, which was brought to court on the transfer of 100 million shares — valued at over $500 million — from Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings to another subsidiary, Broader Media, LLC.

Story of the Week

ASCAP Pays $1.75 Million To Settle DoJ Investigation
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday that the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle allegations that they had engaged in anti-competitive practices in violation of a court order. According to DoJ, ASCAP signed contracts with approximately 150 songwriters and publisher members that made ASCAP the exclusive licensor of their performance rights, despite provisions in a court order prohibiting ASCAP from interfering with its members’ ability to directly license their songs.

As part of the settlement, ASCAP has also promised not to enter into further exclusive contracts and agreed to reform its licensing practices to remove music publishers from overseeing ASCAP’s licensing.

“Settling this matter was the right thing to do for our members,” said ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews in a statement announcing the settlement. “With these issues resolved, we continue our focus on leading the way towards a more efficient, effective and transparent music licensing system and advocating for key reforms to the laws that govern music creator compensation.”

Top Music News Stories

SOCAN Predicts Dramatic YouTube Revenue Uplift As It Acquires Medianet. Canada-based collection society SOCAN has acquired B2B music tech provider Medianet in a bid to ‘ensure that creators and music publishers, including artists and all relevant rights owners, are properly compensated for their work.’

Medianet, SOCAN, YouTube And The Kobalt Effect. “SOCAN has seized the initiative with the Medianet acquisition, setting out its stall as a rights society that puts tech innovation, effective reporting and accountability at the centre of what it does for its members.” says Mark Mulligan, “It has also positioned itself as a contender for global successor of the GRD—consider this the first major repercussion of the innovation and transparency agenda that Kobalt set in motion.”

$300 Million – $600 Million US IPO Planned For China Based Streaming Music Service. China Music Corp, which is backed by Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings and operates Chinese digital music services Kugou and Kuwo, has hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to prep a US IPO that could take place later this year, sources are telling the Wall Street Journal.

Beatport Suspends Auction and Shuts Down Streaming, News and Events Divisions. “Beatport has made a strategic decision to return to its roots, focusing its efforts on its flagship Beatport Store, the leading global source of electronic music for DJs and consumers,” SFX wrote in a statement provided to Billboard.

Irving Azoff Pens An Open Letter To YouTube: ‘The Root Of The Problem Here Is You.’ “You have built a business that works really well for you and for Google, but it doesn’t work well for artists. If you think it is just the labels and publishers who are complaining, you are wrong. The music community is traditionally a very fractured one, but on this we are united.”

Amazon Launches a New Rival for YouTube. Amazon Video Direct, which kicked off Tuesday, shares money with video creators through the method they choose: ads, subscriptions, rentals, or simply by the number of hours streamed to tens of millions of subscribers of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service.

Apple Music Set To Receive A Facelift. Although the service has certainly been picking up users, Apple Music has received some complaints about its less-than-stellar interface. It looks like this is about to change, however, with Apple set to give its streaming service a much needed facelift, in hopes of catching up with Spotify.

We are thrilled to announce that, effective Tuesday, May 10, MediaNet has been acquired by SOCAN, Canada’s premier performing rights organization. This is very exciting for us as a company and enables us to develop exciting new technologies that will benefit the entire digital music industry. Today at 9 AM PT a press release was issued announcing the transaction. It can be found here and is also reproduced in its entirety below:

TORONTO and SEATTLE, May 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ –SOCAN, the member-based organization that represents the performing rights of more than four-million music creators and publishers, has purchased Seattle-based MediaNet. The addition of this pioneer business-to-business music technology provider offers 360-degree music rights administration to SOCAN members.

MediaNet is the creator of powerful music and metadata delivery technologies that work with streaming services, download providers, media search, and other media discovery tools to provide an exhaustive catalog of music, while ensuring that creators and music publishers, including artists and all relevant rights owners, are properly compensated for their work.

The MediaNet acquisition will have immediate benefits for SOCAN members’ digital performances, as the potential for increased matching on radio, TV and in areas such as nightclub performances is substantial. With MediaNet, SOCAN will be able to identify digital performances from around the world in real-time, with access to granular performance data to make better decisions, identify trends and increase revenue for members. This comes with a level of data accuracy and transparency that few, if any, music rights organizations in the world can provide.

With more than 51 million sound recordings in its database, each containing a unique audio identifier, MediaNet will provide SOCAN with authoritative information pertaining to master rights (sound recordings), and will augment already strong matching capabilities for all kinds of performances and reproductions of music on radio, digital, live, satellite, film and TV and other delivery of music to public audiences.

In keeping with SOCAN’s vision to lead the global transformation of music rights, the acquisition and integration of MediaNet’s technology will make SOCAN the leader in accurate matching of music data, one of the most significant challenges facing the digital music ecosystem worldwide. The benefit of robust, accurate matching of repertoire to rights-owners is significant to SOCAN’s existing and future members, and will especially increase revenue streams for all whose music is played on digital platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, SoundCloud and other services relying on uploads.

“The music ecosystem is in need of data and accuracy and, with MediaNet, SOCAN is the first major music collective to meet this need,” said SOCAN CEO Eric Baptiste. “The expanded family of MediaNet and SOCAN creates an unbeatable combination that will help drive proper compensation for SOCAN’s membership base of songwriters, composers and music publishers and potentially for all parties involved in the music value chain.”

For SOCAN’s more than 135,000 members the acquisition of MediaNet brings immediate dramatic improvement in digital match-rates and the speed of distribution of digital royalties. For digital service providers this means a new dimension of accuracy for matching musical works with rich ownership data.

MediaNet will continue to operate under its current name, with all of its 34 employees continuing at the organization’s Seattleoffices. MediaNet CEO Frank Johnson and the company’s leadership team will remain in place.

“SOCAN is a leader in ushering the transition from physical to digital through a commitment to data and artist advocacy,” said MediaNet CEO Frank Johnson. “We are thrilled to join the SOCAN family and realize our shared goal of pioneering high-scale technology solutions that ensure fair and accurate royalty administration.”

The acquisition was completed in May 2016, the terms of which are undisclosed.

About MediaNetMediaNet maintains one of the largest B2B rights-managed, global music catalogs of more than 51 million tracks and a database of over 4.1 million rights holders and their respective works. MediaNet’s database of rights holders encompasses composers, publishers, administrators, PROs, collection societies, performers, labels, and distributors. MediaNet leads the music industry by hosting the only commercially available catalog of sound recordings connected directly to a comprehensive database of rights, ownership, and songwriting splits. MediaNet enables accurate royalty administration for streaming music apps, subscription services, and download stores. MediaNet has powered many popular digital music services worldwide including Beats Music, Pulselocker, CÜR Music, Songza, Target, and Univision.

About SOCANSOCAN is a member-based organization that represents the Canadian performing rights of more than four-million Canadian and international music creators and publishers. SOCAN is proud to play a leading role in supporting the long-term success of its more than 135,000 Canadian members, and the Canadian music ecosystem overall. SOCAN licenses more than 125,000 businesses in Canada, and distributes royalties to its members and music rights organizations around the world. SOCAN also distributes royalties to its members for the use of their music internationally in collaboration with its peer societies.